Virtual machines that are known to run read-intensive applications have begun to underperform. Which action can improve performance?

vFlash Read Cache allows administrators to allocate host-local SSD or flash capacity as a read cache for individual VM disk files (VMDKs). By serving repeated reads from flash rather than from slower backend storage, it directly reduces I/O latency for read-heavy workloads without requiring datastore migration or hardware changes.

VMFS6 improves support for large-capacity drives and automatic space reclamation but does not introduce any caching layer that would address read I/O performance degradation.

Switching DRS to manual mode only affects automated VM placement decisions and has no impact on storage I/O throughput or latency.

Disabling VM encryption may slightly reduce CPU overhead from cipher operations but does not address the underlying read I/O bottleneck causing poor performance for read-intensive VMs.